EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
With Johnny Depp, Dianne Wiest, Winona Ryder, Alan Arkin, Kathy Baker, Vincent Price, and Anthony Michael Hall.
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The title of his first feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, pretty much speaks for itself. Beetlejuice, meanwhile, posited a parallel world of juvenile outsiders, most obviously the title poltergeist and Winona Ryder’s almost terminally depressed girl, but also the two ghosts played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. Though nominally adults, they are chagrined to find themselves excluded from adult company, forced to hide out in an attic, play dress up, and–the ultimate humiliation–suffer continually the condescension of the grown-ups who run their household. The commercially phenomenal Batman, though the least eloquent of Burton’s works and to my mind a cumbersome and shrill failure, at least on the periphery held to his preoccupations, particularly in its otherwise drama-distorting concentration on Jack Nicholson’s Joker, another adult victim of arrested development who spends his time dressing up and playing deadly, dignity-deflating, childish pranks.
As in the past, Burton opens the film with overhead pans and tracks of a terrain of buildings–an abandoned mansion and a suburban development–that are deliberately fake-looking. Everything about these houses, from their scale to their plastic texture, makes them look like models. However, as he did in Beetlejuice, Burton abruptly emerges into a kind of reality: the tiny models turn out to be full-scale and populated by humans, a virtuoso assertion that what follows is a manufactured “reality,” the product of Burton’s own mind, and that he’s made no pretense of detachment or objectivity.
Throughout the action Edward is quiet, polite, and whimpering, so it is inevitable that everyone turns on him. That process begins when Edward, looking into a storefront at the local mall that might serve as a salon for him, is terrified by Joyce Monroe’s attempted seduction. Fleeing from her in fear, he arouses her feminine rage, and she spreads the story that she fended off his attacks. Edward has also been having trouble with Kim’s boyfriend, Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), a high school lothario whose instinctive jealousy of Edward has led him to frame the poor kid in a phony burglary attempt. Throw in Edward’s rescue of the youngest Boggs kid, which is mistaken as an assault, and Edward soon becomes a pariah, rushing back to the safety of the mansion to live out his days in isolation.
Kim is altogether more troubling, a woman on the eve of sexual activity, just as Peg appears to be past it (her relationship with Arkin’s understated Bill is deliberately devoid of romantic streams; indeed, all they talk about is Edward). Edward’s dawning attraction to Kim brings nothing but trouble, particularly in the person of evil Jim. Given Jim’s loquacity, his easy sociability, his open sexuality, and his brutal self-interest, it is easy to see him as a double for Edward, what the quiet loner would be like if he gave in to his “base” feelings.
